Donna Nebenzahl’s Transgender Children

July 3, 2011

When I started reading today’s article “Making The Transition” in the Vancouver Sun about the medical transgendering of youth who struggle with cultural sex role enforcement, I knew I had read the same article before. I checked the date- no, it’s a new article published today. But I knew I had read it before so I googled the author Donna Nebenzahl and sure enough, I had read the same exact article with a few minor changes back in March in the Ottawa Citizen as “Life in Transition” . Or was it the Montreal Gazette where it was also published back in March as a “special to the Gazette” feature “Gender Identity Crisis”?

Who was this freelancer pimping out the same article to three different – possibly more, (too lazy to check)- newspapers over the last six months? Donna Nebenzahl is a freelance “lifestyle” journalist and Genderist who mainly writes articles supportive of the chemical castration and medical mutilation of gender non-conforming youth and those children who reject or struggle with cultural sex roles. She does a few other genderist articles on topics such as “Society’s Lost Boys: Child-Men Delaying Adulthood” (Donna reports: “It’s an epidemic, says American family doctor and psychologist Leonard Sax, author of the books Why Gender Matters and, most recently, Boys Adrift.”

“While this change has developed alongside the successes girls now show at university and in the workforce, girls can’t be blamed for it.” Donna continues,” In other words, schools are not boyfriendly places. It starts in kindergarten, where children are expected to sit and learn, which wasn’t expected of them until Grade 1 just a few decades ago. Problem is, reading drills are really boring for a boy, who is hardwired, some psychologists believe, for rough-and-tumble play at that age. He’s distracted, underperforms, gets scolded, hates school.”

“This large gender divide has ramifications, write Frenette and Zeman,” Donna reports, “Women are delaying the age at which they have their first child, and will likely reduce the gender wage gap.” (OH NOEZZZZZ!!!!! -GM)

Donna helpfully leaves us a list of resources at the end of her article. (click on the link above to read the whole piece of crap)

and “Guyland- Why are so many young men adrift?” (“While this change has developed alongside the successes girls now show at university and in the workforce, girls can’t be blamed for it” Donna says familiarly. She warns: “In the past, marriage and family were markers of adulthood, writes Michael Kimmel in his book Guyland, but in a world where young women put off children for careers, where job security is a thing of the past and their parents’ values hold little allure, young men can postpone adulthood almost indefinitely.”) and also some overtly genderist home design articles such as “Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice- That’s What Little Girl’s Rooms Are Made Of” which was published two weeks ago Also years ago when she was pretending to be feminist (or at least sucking up scant feminist grants) she authored a book ostensibly about Women Activists called “Womankind: Faces of Change Around The World” in which she and a photographer, according to Publisher’s Weekly: “With funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, they traveled the world “to get to the heart of why women care enough to dedicate their lives to helping others.” For each of the 45 women or teams of women, they present four pages of photos and text in various font size, with a listing of contact information at the book’s end.”

“A few, mostly in the developed world, work to improve the status of women (e.g., Kathe Kollwitz’s Guerilla Girls fighting sexism in the American arts community). The volume skews toward African activists (caring for AIDS orphans, empowering rural women) and is curiously devoid of Middle Eastern women. American readers may be surprised to find so few grassroots activists (there’s Katsi Cook, a native healer; and Clementina Chery, an anti-gang violence activist in Dorchester, Mass.), but a full spread on writer Robin Morgan. Although the sepia-toned photos are very handsome, the selection seems strange: some of the American entries are tired, recycled and even irrelevant in the company of other women struggling for more basic causes.”

As far as I know only one of the activists was talked into being photographed as a nude, so that is a good thing. According to the book jacket she is a married hetero with two children and no ties to the Lesbian and Gay or Trans communities. (Although it is possible she is having one of her children medically treated for gender non-compliance). What I can say for certain is that she is a genderist activist who has no interest in feminism and deliberately avoids mentioning any connection between social sex roles and the female class. As seen above she is mainly concerned with how females are impacting the quality of life for men.

The published and re-published (re-hashed) article published (republished) today, about correction of gender non-conforming (mainly gay) children is the most genderist slanted conservative crap this side of the American Family Association – or the Ayatollah Khomeini– with no mention whatsoever of any viewpoint that questions the nature of sex roles. A pretty amazing feat for someone writing about them. Nebenzahl, if you couldn’t tell from the info cited above, is an unaoplogetic right-wing genderist through and through.

Some excerpts from the piece:

“At age 5, Shamai was a boy in a little girl’s body. He remembers demanding a short haircut and when a lady on the street “mistook” him for a boy, turning to his mother and saying: “This lady knows better than you! She knows I’m a boy.”

(Rejection of sex-role+desiring short haircut= birth defect. See how simple?)

” They are transgendered youth, all in their 20s now, from different backgrounds but with stories that are similar: moments of childhood clarity when you realize that you’re not who you appear to be turning into an aching discomfort often leading to despair. In the majority of cases, these conflicts and concerns take years to work through, as the young person living inside a body they don’t understand, or want, often deals with isolation, self-loathing, bullying and suicidal thoughts. Then they make the frightening and often lonely journey to transform that body into the gender they identify with, coping with depression, the grief and possibly loss of their family, and a complex medical process.”

(These are actual fucking verbatim quotes. Check the article if you don’t believe me. Tropes Galore. Young adult subculture with shared narrative- nothing trendy to consider there, huh Donna? Then she says these kids are “not WHO you appear to be” she means that sex and sex-roles are “Who We Are” , the ultimate in conservative gender essentialism. Guess what Donna- our sex, our race, our various body types aren’t “Who We Are” on a desert island. They only MATTER in a sexist, racist, ablest society. And it might be okay for you to play a little fast and loose with that for the sake of your exposition were it not for the fact that you are doing it in the context of a piece advocating for the sterilization, castration and medically sanctioned disabling of children. Children you pathologize and refer to as “cases”. And ya know what Donna, you know this. Because in one sentence you refer to the “cases” – I mean children, as not being WHO they are because of their “defective” healthy bodies, but in the next you refer to them as living “inside a body”, beings not defined by their vessel. So get real. We’re talking about social roles applied to bodies according to reproductive function here. And you fucking know it.

The narrative of: they struggle for years and then they transform that body “into a gender” insinuates that all kids that struggle with sex roles have a one way path to “a complex medical process” is an incredibly damaging insinuation to make about children who fight sex-roles, most of whom when left to mature turn out to be well adjusted Lesbians and Gays. The fact that you never mention that 98% of gender non-conforming children referred for “treatment” will, when left to mature naturally STOP suffering from “gender dysphoria” on their own is the HEIGHT OF JOURNALISTIC MALEFEASANCE. Your homophobic agenda is undeniable. NOT ONCE does “Donna” MENTION the statistics of childhood HOMOSEXUALITY in these articles on gender non-conforming children!!!!!!!! NOT ONCE!!!!!! NOT ONE SINGLE TIME! When we know the vast majority of children referred for “treatment” are homosexual kids who will simply grow up gay. Donna Nebenzahl is a gay exterminationist- and anti-gay “correctionist”. And here is the kicker:

“While some professionals continue to see gender identity issues as psychological, ongoing research is moving toward the hypothesis of biological changes that take place in the womb rather than environmental influences,” Donna claims.

“Moving toward a hypothesis”=“Moving Towards a Proposed Explanation for a Phenomenon”. Can you believe the editors at the Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette and Ottawa Citizen allowed this bigotry? Would they allow it on an article about race or ethnicity? Or religion? Or any other oppression that involves straight males? Genderism isn’t a hypothesis. Genderism is a philosophy.

A hypothesis is: “human individual and social character traits may be caused biologically” . Genderism is: “Males are inherently dominant and females are inherently submissive to males and if the role doesn’t fit, the physical sex must be corrected because incongruence to this principle is against nature.”

Here’s another winner from old Donna Nebenzahl:

“Psychologist Françoise Susset’s specialty, within her family practice, is sexual minority issues. President elect of the Canadian Professional Association for Transgendered Health (CPATH), she is particularly concerned with supporting parents and with educating educators about gender expression – especially when exhibited by boys.”

Whut? Why especially when exhibited by boys? WE DON’T KNOW. Donna’s comment is completely unqualified. Never explained. Like it should be obvious to us all. Look at the article- I’m not making this shit up! To exterminate gay boy children more effectively? One might think with all the recent coverage on psychiatric abuse of gay boys Donna might feel it prudent to qualify that statement but no, we are all supposed to “know” what that means. Wink wink nudge nudge.

Donna reports: “Just think, says Buckland, how complicated it is for the average person to go through puberty and adolescence – “and on top of all that to feel so uncomfortable in your own skin and to be so ashamed of your body because you don’t feel the body parts fit how you want to approach the world.”

Duh. Why would body parts have to fit how you want to approach the world? On a desert island, how does skin color or sex effect how you “approach the world”? This is fucking HATE SPEECH. We’re talking about constrictive outdated conservative right wing SEX ROLES here. And this from a person with the professional authority to green light mutilating sex role protesting children.

Donna on “James” a 14 year old girl hospitalized for anorexia:

“He recalls the psychiatrist asking him why he presented himself in such a masculine way. “And I really wasn’t sure. She said, ‘If you could become a guy and no one but you would know, would you do it?’ I said, ‘Of course!’ I realized I thought all girls wanted to be guys!”

The psychologist (sic- Donna does not know there is a difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist and neither do her editors) gave James the number for Project 10, a resource centre for trans people that provides names of trans friendly doctors and psychologists, who might write letters to give them access to hormones and surgeries – and he began his journey into maleness.”

Donna on a gay male youth:

“Samantha’s struggle was also acute, and lonely. “I suppressed or denied it. Used mental acrobatics. But I wasn’t really good at acting like a boy,” (he) says. “I’d wear a T-shirt and jeans and sweaters but in high school people would say that I was feminine.”

On lesbian Shamai who Donna states: “At age 17, (she) came out as a lesbian, but discovered it wasn’t enough”. (According to Donna, Lesbian is a lesser form of “male”. Thanks Donna!)

“The therapist asked to see (her) journal writings and pointed out to Shamai that the journal, written in Hebrew, was written in the masculine form.

“She said, ‘Will you talk to me the way you talk in your diary?’ and when I tried it, talking in a masculine form, I felt like someone released something from inside. It changed everything.”

Hey I’m an authority figure and you’re a baby dyke. Your writing is very “masculine”. Please talk to me in that masculine way and I will give you approval. Funny you didn’t talk that way on your own without being prompted, but hey, that’s what I’m here for. Let me give you a number to call for some treatment. You must be a man.

Donna elaborates,“Shamai started dressing as a man, although never at (her)parents’ home”

Whaa? This sort of hyper- genderist fear may sound strange to most Gays and Lesbians but it’s why these kids get taken in by the authority figures who want to “correct them”. They are raised very conservative and very fearful at being gender non-conformist. They are terrified! The rest of us started wearing gowns or suits for fun when we were kids and insisted on choosing our own clothes but these kids have internalized the right-wing conservative genderism philosophy. Can you imagine a girl being afraid to wear “men’s clothes”? Jesus maybe a boy wearing a dress takes some balls – although many do, both gay and straight- and more every day- but jesus a girl hiding “men’s clothes”? This is a level of Genderist conservatism unprecedented in the modern age- major cultural backlash. If you look at any of the trans sites there are thread after thread about “getting a male haircut” and “how to stop trembling while shopping in the men’s department” and for the boys “how to grow your hair out” or “how fun it is wearing a blouse”. Holy moley less than 2 centuries ago it was the men wearing powder and wigs and being the fancy peacocks. We need a revolution and we need it NOW before one more kid gets run through the medical machine that trash journalists like Donna “Hack” Nebenzahl make nickel promoting.

22 Responses to “Donna Nebenzahl’s Transgender Children”

Insanity at its best. I’m really glad I was a free child and never met these sick fucks. I always loves “boy things”. Children don’t need to be corrected and castrated because they like this or that. This is fucking insane!! Someone have to stop these people.

Guess what Donna- our sex, our race, our various body types aren’t “Who We Are” on a desert island. They only MATTER in a sexist, racist, ablest society.

Awimm to that GM. No one on a desert island is going to give two hoots about what they look like.

As for the ‘shame’ about men’s clothes in the wardrobe, half my clothes ARE men’s clothes (usually much cheaper, usually better made for the same price). And I hate frilly crap. Totally hate it. But, none of that means “I am rilly a manz inside”. I am biologically a human female, it is just a fact. It’s not my ‘gender’ it is my biological sex. I have no gender.

That this same article is being recycled over and over makes me wonder if it’s just being used as a propaganda piece. The larger context/motivation is probably about “saving our boys” who now have it so veewwy, veewwy hard because a few feminists made some teeny-tiny gains. In other words, attacking the feminist/lesbian position on all possible fronts.

I also find it curious that one of the so-called experts is a counselor at Concordia University. If you look it up, there is a whole network of C.U.s, a conservative Lutheran (Missouri Synod) denomination. If you look at an online application for their seminary, part of the Concordia network, you will see a question, “Have you ever engaged in a homosexual act?” right in with “Have you ever been convicted of a felony? and similar questions. Does this mean that this group is more comfortable with someone who becomes a different “gender” and thus becomes “straight” than with homosexuals? It’s pretty suspicious.

The thought of these operations being done on young children is devastatingly sad.

This is the kind of stuff they run on holidays when they know know one is reading, and it doesn’t cost them anything because they bought all rights so can run it in all their media as often as they like. Ref to: when no one is reading.

Donna, nearing 60 bless her heart, is a part time instructor at Concordia (Journalism) and her most noteworthy article is not this, running on the day after Canada Day AND the day the Royals are traipsing around (even more not reading). No, it is one that documents another transition, that of the destruction of the Boreal forest in the Gaspe Peninsula, aka known as the mutilation of something natural which just flourished on its own for eons, and replacing it with …something that needs constant chemical and ‘surgical’ intervention. Donna and her contractor called *that* article the heartwarming story of turning the imperfect wilderness into a “garden”.

This bullshit about schools being an unfriendly environment for boys has never been proven and seems to be a theme that has popped up in regular intervalls since the beginning of the 20th century, iirc. I once got the opportunity to write a paper about the effect of the percentage of female teachers in a school on the pupils’ achievement and well-being so I could sample some of the research. The findings are contradictory and the push to change schools to suit boys’ “needs” is not based on any conclusive evidence whatsoever. People are just afraid that the “true” male will die out in favour of a “feminized” male who successfully “conformed”. Or they think that every boy should be supported in his full individuality by reducing him to his sex. Yeah, I do not know what this is supposed to accomplish either. As always when it comes to men and their important feelings of pain there’s a lot of whining and self-flagellation, e.g. about the deep traumatization suffered by boys who had to helplessly watch girls drool over older guys. I actually read this in a book- it’s supposed to be a massive problem that calls for intervention. I heard some guys just get over it.

And what’s up with Kimmel? I thought Guyland was about how men’s failure to adapt to women’s independence and self-sufficiency has created a hyper-masculine and woman-hating subculture which is very dangerous. I haven’t read the book so I’m really confused now.

Also: that passage on how gender non-conforming boys need special attention actually had me blankly staring at the screen. Cannot believe this is happening in the 21st century. I find it despicable that trans are increasing their wealth and status by helping parents to transform their boys into the “girl they have always been inside” because it’s better than having a “faggot” as a son. Seriously, who’s going to be especially concerned about boys playing wil dolls or arranging tea parties except homophobes and sexists? And where does it stop? Flexible gender definitions so that anything besides slavish conformism to reductionism is trans?

If we ever had a march against the transsexual empire, this is what I would put on my banner.
What normal parent would even see fit to judge the games thier children choose to play? As long as they’re not biting other kids or harming themselves there is no justification for making any sort of judgements.

Most boys (and this is quite interesting) seem to identify with their mothers until they reach a certain age. Many boys pretend their pregnant..and are tangibly dissapointed when they realise that only girls get to have babies. This is fairly common from the chats I have had with mothers. OTOH, i Have never. ever. heard a tale of a little girl expressing a wish for a penis. Womb envy starts early🙂

I think that boys, if left to their own devices, would *not* choose masculinity.

The university president’s conference of 2009 ((I believe it was) had a keynote speech that was all “what about the men” who are being overshadowed and pushed out by women in the sciences and engineering departments (think of the irony there, and the 14 engineering students massacred by a gun wielding fanatic screaming that FEMINISTS had taken his place!). I digress.

Anyway, the keynote hand-wringing what-about-the-menz speech was delivered by a WOMAN university president in the roll up to that conference, and press-released all over the world, no less.

Donna continues,” In other words, schools are not boyfriendly places. It starts in kindergarten, where children are expected to sit and learn, which wasn’t expected of them until Grade 1 just a few decades ago. Problem is, reading drills are really boring for a boy, who is hardwired, some psychologists believe, for rough-and-tumble play at that age. He’s distracted, underperforms, gets scolded, hates school.”

The “lost boys” and schooling failures also made my eyes bug out too. In the circumstance where boys are underperforming at school … their solution is LESS (academic) pressure for boys? What kind of half-baked logic is that?

Schools have become more of (but not fully) a level playing field, and a lot of the barriers have been removed for girls, they naturally outperform the boys. Historically, girls were shut out of education all together, or discouraged in certain subjects like maths and sciences. Boys could ONLY outperform the girls in an unlevel and biased environment. Seriously folks, the only real conclusion you can draw from history to the present and boys’ academic performance is that boys are actually dumb and can only succeed in a system biased for them. It is one of patriarchy’s classic reversals, that males are supposedly smarter than females. There are still some parts of the world where girls are shut out of education all together. The so-called “education crisis” (which is girls outperforming boys) has been going on for 20 years. Funny how they did not call it an “educational crisis” when girls were actively discouraged during (or attending) school. It only became a “crisis” when their precious little patriarchs were being academically beaten by girls.

boys are actually dumb and can only succeed in a system biased for them.

I think they are used to being rewarded for being male so many of them don’t work hard. I have data about Indonesia in which boys reacted negatively to a lot of variables that girls were not bothered by in the least, including average teacher experience. The more experience a teacher had the worse the boys’ achievement (in maths) – I guess boys are fine as long as they can weasel their way out of trouble, something that becomes harder the longer a teacher has worked. And yeah, Indonesia is definitely not a state that discriminates against men.

“folks, the only real conclusion you can draw from history to the present and boys’ academic performance is that boys are actually dumb and can only succeed in a system biased for them. ”

Absolutely. Men knew they only way they would be able to make any scientific or medical advances of their own was by blocking women’s access to education. They knew women would outshine them in every single field.

why else would have felt so threatened by women’s brain-power that they refused to let us study?

And now that women are studying we are outstripping men by miles

And the funny thing is… girls have had to fit themselves into an education system *designed* *for* *boys* !! That’s the joke here. Men designed it for boys… and girls still do better.
LMFAO

I want to second cherry’s opinion that women had to adapt to a system designed by and for males. It’s ridiculous how sitting still and only talking when asked (otherwise it meant the rod) was once considered the epitome of good education and not considered to “inhibit boys’ natural inclination”. Things only became “problematic” after a majority of teachers turned out to be female because of the devaluation of the job driving men away from teaching or into headmaster positions.

Boys could ONLY outperform the girls in an unlevel and biased environment. Seriously folks, the only real conclusion you can draw from history to the present and boys’ academic performance is that boys are actually dumb and can only succeed in a system biased for them. It is one of patriarchy’s classic reversals, that males are supposedly smarter than females.

BINGO!

Here’s something I’ve become aware of over the course of my worklife. Males are not bright nor capable. For instance, the CEO of the place where I work. I watched him after he was hired and started to simplify everything. Before too long I realized that he was doing this because he was not capable of understanding or handling much complexity. (I suspect George W. Bush had this problem, too).

This other thing is that he was very authoritarian. He could only handle his own ideas, and could not figure out what to do with other people’s input.

I believe that this is why patriarchal systems are generally hierarchichys. Men cannot handle anything very complex.

He has done a lot of damage to some things that were working pretty well by dumbing them down. Men learn to pretend and lie about what they know. They will bully their way in, acting as if smarter people are stupid.

I hope this isn’t too off topic, but I do think that this woman, Donna N., is pandering to these males and just parroting the party line for them. It is the only way women get paid often, so I’m not being harsh on her as a person, just that I disagree with what she is doing and like to see why.

I don’t like to trash a woman, or a woman’s work, even if it is crap. That’s why I didn’t rip this article a new asshole when I first read it back in March. But when I saw that Donna’s going to keep churning out articles supporting the medical mutilation of gender non-compliant children, it made me look into just what her agenda was. The gloves are coming off.
I do appreciate your nuanced criticism.

I too have a “dangerous” exemption clause. If some woman is acting as a mouthpiece for men, and promoting dangerous (to women/children) agenda, then the gloves do have to come off sometimes.

The female puppets that do this stuff get cookies, approval, money, by becoming male mouthpieces. Females that oppose the patriarchy agenda don’t get any of that, and additionally, a lot of hate directed towards them.

Katie too right, most women’s work is like this — piece meal, part-time, casual, fill-in, maternity leave, we-have-a-rush-on, Xmas, someone shot 14 women and the real journalists are busy — and the way women pay the rent on the substandard apartment in the dangerous neighbourhood, raise their chidren, pay their kid’s tuitions for a better life, dental work, everything.

It’s SO VERY DIFFERENT from what the MEN posting here do, whatever the hell frock they’re wearing this week.

However. No editor put the word out on this. This is her hobby horse. She is making herself an expert on this, or has brought expertise to the table.

And it is a thing of beauty to watch GM take it down, isn’t it?

P.S. Could you drop by? Just took some scones out of the oven. You know the way.

GM and FABLibber, excellent points about the “gloves coming off” and the “dangerous exemption” clauses. Thinking about where to draw the line but I do think with her there is a pattern here. She’s clearly a mouthpiece for some utterly corrupt points of view and there appears to be a pattern here, too.

I’ve been reading (and am in love with) Mary Daly. In Outercourse she is talking about assimilation, one of the Deadly Sins of the Fathers, which are “the primary manifestations of patriarchal evil. . .and in those who invent, control, and legitimate these institutions.” Seems to fit what you are saying here.